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Week in Review

Good morning. I hope you had a fabulous week! We got our yard all decorated for Halloween this weekend. In our neighborhood, people put out almost as many decorations for Halloween as they do for Christmas!! It's a little crazy and a lot of fun. Here's a picture of my yard:

Reviews and Blog Posts
Last week, I celebrated my blogiversary with a giveaway and I chose the winners today. If you entered, be sure to check out the giveaway page and your email to see if you won!

Reading
I participated in the Wonderfully Wicked Read-a-Thon but didn't get as much reading done as I had hoped. I read all of To the Breaking Point, which was 307 pages. But I only read about half of The Light Between Oceans: A Novel
by M.L. Stedman. I'm on page 143. My book club meets this week to discuss that one. And I have to read and review This Dark Road to Mercy
by Wiley Cash by Friday! I need another readathon this week!

Kids Reading
C is still reading through the How to Train Your Dragon
books by Cressida Cowell. We got a few more from the library this weekend. M finished Diary of a Wimpy Kid
by Jeff Kinney and started the second one last night.

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It seems that blogging has dropped to the bottom of my list for the past year, and was pretty low for the year or two prior to that. I love to read, and am continuing to do so, but as my regular readers know I haven't been around much. My last blog post was almost a year ago!!

There are many things that have taken me away from blogging. Work has been much more challenging and interesting these past few years, but that means I really don't want to get back on the computer when I get home at night - or on the weekends.

Family life has been more busy with kids having multiple activities in the evenings, leaving little time to just hang out and write about the books that I read.

I will admit to a bit of a Facebook addiction, which means way too much time spent scrolling through my newsfeed instead of doing something more productive. This is one of the things I'm working on and hoping that this will free up some time for getting back to the blog.

Peter Byerly is distraught over the loss of his wife nine months ago. He has retreated to their cottage in the English countryside, hoping to return to his love of collecting and restoring rare books. But when he opens a book about Shakespeare forgeries and finds a Victorian watercolor of a woman who looks just like his wife, Peter is soon on a search for the origin of the painting and the truth about Shakespeare's real identity.

The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession
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According to Wikipedia:
The Junie B. Jones series came in at #71 on the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books from 2000-2009. Reasons cited are poor social values taught by the books and Junie B. Jones not being considered a good role model due to her mouthiness and bad spelling/grammar.
This is an interesting example of a banned book. Many times there are serious, controversial topics featured in books that are challenged. Things like homosexuality, drugs, vulgar language, etc. You can actually understand why people may not want their children to read those books, and why they may challenge their inclusion in school libra…